“Somehow the Soviets got to her. Maybe through her family, maybe through radicalization in college, who knows?”
Stallings fell silent. He was deep in thought and he ran a finger across his desk blotter, making random patterns on the paper. Tracie doubted he even realized he was doing it.
Finally he spoke. “We could sit here all day tossing out theories regarding the motivations of traitors and murderers. The truth will come out now. It always does once you turn over the rocks and shine a light directly underneath.”
“The question is where do we go from here?”
“And the answer to that question is clear: you’re going to plug the leak. Permanently. Eliminate the security risk.”
“Me?”
“Am I not speaking clearly, Tanner? Did I lose my voice? Am I speaking in tongues?” If Aaron Stallings had been thrown for a loop by the news that one of his handpicked employees was a traitor, it hadn’t taken him long to recover. He was already much closer to the acerbic, tough-as-nails bully Tracie had come to know than to the vulnerable, elderly man he had seemed just moments ago.
“Eliminate the security risk.” She spoke slowly, trying out the words. They sounded almost foreign and the knot that had sat in her stomach since pulling the trigger on Slava Marinov suddenly seemed to mushroom.
“You heard me.”
“Sir…” She stared at her boss and he returned the look, his eyes flinty.
She coughed into her fist and tried again. “Sir, with all due respect, I will not assassinate a United States citizen. I don’t care what he’s done or what he stands accused of doing. That’s a line I cannot and will not cross.”
Stallings’s eyes narrowed as she spoke until by the end of her statement his pupils were barely visible. His lips had nearly disappeared, his mouth a bloodless slash.
The silence stretched out.
The air was electric.
The CIA chief was capable of a lot. Tracie had known that since her first hour of her first day working for him. But this was beyond anything she could possibly have imagined. He was sanctioning the murder of an American, on U.S. soil?
An icy chill enveloped her, colder than even the bitterest temperatures she had just endured in the middle of a Moscow winter.
She wasn’t sure how long they sat facing each other. It might have been thirty seconds or it might have been ten years. It felt like a lifetime.
But Tracie didn’t care how long Aaron Stallings remained silent or how angry he got. Or what the repercussions of refusing the order might be. She had reached her limit.
The silence stretched to the breaking point and then Stallings leaned back in his chair. His eyes widened and his expression softened.
He said, “Apparently we’re having a bit of a miscommunication. I wasn’t ordering the assassination of an American citizen, Tanner. I would never condone such a thing.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, that’s so. When I say I want you to plug the leak and eliminate the security risk, I mean only that I want you to go get Goodell. Take him into custody. Bring him to Langley for debriefing.”
His lie was transparent, but at least he had backed off his shocking instruction. Tracie didn’t feel much better, though. The knot in her stomach remained just as large and just as virulent.
“Why would I go get him? Isn’t that a job for the FBI?”
“He’ll be turned over to the FBI. Eventually. But before that happens, I want to interrogate him. Personally. It was agency intelligence specialists who died because of this man’s treason. I want him to answer to agency personnel for it. We owe the dead men that much. Goodell can answer to the law when I’m done with him.”
“Sir…I understand the desire to interrogate a traitor, to try to understand the thought process that would allow a man to look himself in the mirror every day after being directly responsible for the deaths of innocent me, men whose lives depended on Goodell’s discretion. But don’t you think you might jeopardize any legal case against Goodell if you take it upon yourself to question him before turning him over?”
“I’m not worried about any ‘legal case’ against him. I want to look him in the eyes and ensure he understands exactly what his actions wrought. I want to read him the names of the men who died because of his actions, to list the wives who are now widowed and the children who will grow up without fathers. I want him to explain to me exactly why he thought his life was more important than theirs.”
Tracie had learned long ago that the only person who stood a chance of changing Aaron Stallings’s mind when he felt strongly about something was the president of the United States, and even then it wouldn’t be thanks to the strength of his argument.
It certainly wasn’t going to be accomplished by a lowly field operative, and an unofficial one at that. If Stallings were determined to speak face-to-face with the traitor he would do so, with Tracie’s help or without it.
She sighed. “When do I meet my team?”
“Team?”
“Yes. When do I meet with the other operatives we’ll use to apprehend Goodell?”
He snorted. “You should know better than that, Tanner. There’s not going to be any team. You are the team.”
38
January 27, 1988
7:50 a.m.
Aaron Stallings’ residence
McLean, Virginia
“I’m going to take him myself? Sir, we’re talking about a traitor directly responsible for the deaths of more than a half-dozen men. Don’t you think approaching him with a single agency operative might not be treating the situation with the gravity it deserves?”
“Jesus Christ, Tanner, would you listen to yourself? You just returned from the heart of the Soviet Union, where you single-handedly eliminated one of the highest-ranking KGB officers we’ve ever removed.”
“Ryan Smith helped.”
“You know what I mean. Smith was nothing more than logistical support. That was your op and you handled it beautifully.” His tone coarsened. “Aside from ignoring your orders to eliminate Piotr Speransky, of course.”
“We’ve already been over that, sir. Speransky provided the intel that’s allowing us to ‘plug this leak,’ as you put it, once and for all.”
“Yes,” Stallings agreed with a glower. “And there was absolutely no reason you couldn’t have eliminated him after you extracted the intel. No reason other than a misplaced sense of morality, or fairness, or some other quaint but meaningless notion.
“But that’s not the point,” he continued. “The point is that after all the assignments you’ve undertaken in your career, nearly all of them solo missions, now you’re worried about apprehending one ink-stained bureaucrat and escorting him to Langley?”
Tracie shook her head. “Why do you even need me? Can’t you just get security to bring him from his office to yours? He works in the same complex as you. Hell, you probably don’t even need guys with guns to escort him. Just call him into a meeting and then take him when he arrives.”
“Thank you for telling me how to do my job,” Stallings said drily. “But for your information, Goodell is on vacation. He’s taking some time off. He won’t be back at Langley for nearly two weeks. Given all that just happened in Moscow, I think it’s a safe bet that the KGB will try to alert their operative here in D.C. and pull the plug on the operation ASAP. If we wait until Goodell returns to work we’ll probably never see him again.”
“Maybe he’s disappeared already. We already talked about how easy it will be for the KGB to put together the assassination of Marinov and the disappearance of Speransky. Wouldn’t notifying their operative here in D.C. be their first move?”
“Exactly. That’s why we need to move now to bring in Goodell.”
“I don’t understand. I’m supposed to bring in Goodell, and a KGB operative who may or may not already be aware we’re coming for her? And I’m supposed to do this with no assistance and no backup?”
“No, Tanner, you’re not suppo
sed to do that.”
She spread her hands. “What am I missing?”
“Goodell and Porter haven’t been living together for more than two years. Given what we now know about Goodell, it seems obvious that their live-in relationship lasted only as long as it took for Porter to determine she had sufficient control over Goodell. Once she made that determination, she abandoned the sham romantic relationship and took over more of a traditional handler’s role.”
Tracie squinted in concentration, trying to parse the CIA chief’s words. There was almost always more to what Aaron Stallings was saying than what he was saying.
Then it hit her.
“You don’t know where Porter is, do you?”
“I told you already, Tanner, we checked her out thoroughly after our people started dying. She passed with flying colors. Of course we kept an eye on her while she and Goodell were shacking up, but at that point it was mostly routine. Once she moved out of his apartment, yes, we lost track of her. Our resources are not unlimited.”
“So the KGB could already have contacted her. We have no way of knowing.”
“That’s exactly why I had your driver bring you straight here from the airport. That’s exactly why you’re talking to me right now instead of sleeping in your own bed. This mission isn’t over yet. We have a team scouring the area for Porter, but she’s not your concern.”
“My concern is Goodell.”
“Exactly. Your only concern is getting David Goodell here where I can have a little conversation with my former protégé before we turn the son of a bitch over to face prosecution. And if there’s an ounce of justice in the world, a firing squad.”
The knot in Tracie’s stomach continued to grow.
Something was wrong here.
She’d felt it almost from the moment she sat down in front of Aaron Stallings’s desk, and she had no doubt whatsoever the feeling was more than just exhaustion.
Stallings jotted something down on a small piece of notepaper and handed it across his desk. “The top address is Goodell’s D.C. apartment. The one below it is the home of his ex-wife and children. I’ll expect to see the traitor standing in my Langley office by noon.”
Tracie accepted the slip of paper. She folded it and dropped it into her blouse pocket without looking at it. She gazed at Stallings appraisingly.
Now it was Stallings’s turn to spread his hands. “Well?”
“Well, what?”
“What the hell are you still doing here? I gave you your assignment. Unless you think Goodell is hiding behind my bookcase, there’s no reason for you to still be here. Get the hell out of here and round up a traitor.”
Tracie stood without a word. She held her boss’s stare a moment longer, then turned and walked out the door.
39
January 27, 1988
9:40 a.m.
D.C. Arms Apartments
Washington, D.C.
The apartment complex was called the D.C. Arms, and its condition emphasized the extent of David Goodell’s fall from grace.
There was nothing wrong with the place, not exactly. Nothing Tracie could put her finger on. But the buildings seemed down on their luck, gone slightly to seed. It was definitely not the sort of place one would expect a government heavy hitter like David Goodell to live.
Tracie pictured Goodell driving into the pothole-strewn parking lot every day, wondering how things had gone so wrong in his life. To head up a CIA intelligence division like Eurasian Operations, especially at such a young age, represented a major accomplishment, and would of course be accompanied by a salary commensurate with the job’s responsibilities.
For a rising star like Goodell to end up here, living in a lower-middle-class apartment complex whose best days were far behind it—if they had ever existed at all—would be humiliating in the extreme.
The apartment complex provided a perfect illustration of the financial difficulties that must have played such a major role in his co-opting by the Soviets.
Tracie felt a tug of sympathy for the man but then swallowed it back.
David Goodell was a traitor whose actions had led to the deaths multiple agents who had been serving their country honorably. Financial problems were a poor excuse for a man to sell secrets to another country. Hell, they were no excuse at all, and if he’d allowed himself to be seduced by a KGB operative it was even worse.
There was no reason to feel sorry for David Goodell.
None.
Tracie kicked herself mentally and then double-checked the slip of paper Stallings had given her with the pair of addresses jotted on it.
Apartment 3-B.
She glanced from the paper to the building located directly in front of her agency car. A carved wooden 3 hanging above the entryway told her she was in the right place. Goodell’s place should be inside, presumably on the first floor.
The complex was relatively large, but the buildings had been laid out in an easy-to-follow manner and it had taken Tracie roughly ten seconds to pull to a stop in the proper lot.
There was no way of knowing whether Goodell was here—if the man was taking a vacation in January, she assumed he must be a winter sports enthusiast, meaning he could well be in Vermont, or Colorado, or any of a hundred other skiing destinations.
Or he could be here, holed up in his apartment, hiding from the world.
She hoped that was the case. If not, the next stop would have to be Goodell’s ex-wife’s home—the second address on her list—and she had absolutely no desire to face the woman the traitor had thrown over to be with a Soviet spy. Tracie knew exactly what the woman’s first thought would be: here comes another of my ex-husband’s conquests. What the hell does she want with me?
And if Goodell happened to be there, things would go from bad to worse. She had no legal authority to compel him to accompany her, so if he hesitated she would be forced either to get physical or to threaten him with her weapon. She would have to do so in front of his children. Tempers would flare. The likelihood of an ugly—and dangerous—scene would be high.
Please be here, she thought to herself. Don’t make me barge in on your family. Dealing an angry ex or frightened children were not in Tracie’s comfort zone. They were nowhere near her comfort zone. She would rather face down a Soviet operative or defuse a ticking bomb.
Tracie realized she was stalling for no good reason. She’d wanted to observe the apartment for a while before entering, but “a while” had gone by and the area was quiet.
Something was bothering her, the same sense of ill-defined unease she’d been feeling since leaving Aaron Stallings’s home office, and she remained unable to identify it.
Goodell would pose little threat to her, even if he were armed. He hadn’t served the CIA in any operational capacity. He’d never even been in the military. He’d had no operational training at all as far as Tracie knew.
It was possible—likely, even—the Soviets had alerted Goodell’s KGB handler to the collapse of Project Kremlyov Infection, which meant it was possible she was out there somewhere.
But Tracie doubted that was the case. It was much more likely the operative had departed the area as quickly as she could. She would know the Americans were coming for her and would abandon her old identity immediately, shedding it like a snake slipping its skin.
Then she would adopt a new one and attempt to make her way out of the country.
It was what Tracie would have done in her unknown adversary’s place.
She sighed heavily and pushed open her car door, then trudged across the parking lot to the building’s entrance and pressed the buzzer to Apartment 3-B.
She noted with little surprise that Goodell had never placed his name inside the slot next to the button for his apartment. He’d probably told himself this location was only temporary, that he would be on to bigger and better things soon.
Or he didn’t want to be found.
Tracie waited thirty seconds and when nothing happened she pressed the buzzer aga
in. This time she held the button down a good long time. A few more seconds went by and she was trying to decide whether to pursue this location any further or move on to the ex’s house when the tinny speaker next to the buzzer squawked to life.
“Yeah?” It sounded like a man’s voice, but distortion from the old, cheap speaker made even that determination a risky proposition. The voice sounded lethargic.
Uninterested.
Hopeless.
Tracie assumed the microphone would be located next to the speaker. She leaned down and said, “Mr. Goodell?”
“Who wants to know?” Immediate suspicion.
“UPS.”
A short delay, and then, “I don’t remember ordering any packages.”
Tracie had expected that response, and immediately came back with, “Are you…Mr. David Goodell? If so, this has your name on it.” She hoped she’d put just enough hesitation into her voice to make it seem like she’d been peering at the name on a package.
“Fine.” The suspicion never left the man’s voice but he sounded resigned, and a moment later the buzzer sounded and Tracie was inside the building.
She entered into a small foyer, grungy and dimly lit even in the daytime. Scanned the doorways, which ran down both sides of a long hallway. 3-B was on the right side, and Tracie double-timed to the entrance, wanting to be standing right in front of it when Goodell opened the door.
Assuming, of course, he hadn’t already exited a rear window and was even now sprinting through the parking lot in a desperate attempt at escape.
A moment later the door opened a crack. The apartment complex hadn’t provided peepholes for the residents to see who might be standing in the hallway, so Goodell had no choice but to peer through the narrow opening.
The moment he did, Tracie slipped her foot into the gap. She hoped he wouldn’t panic and try to slam it shut. The prospect of bringing the traitor in while hobbling on a broken foot held no appeal.
“You’re not UPS.” The voice was the same as the one that had floated through the speaker, minus the scratchy distortion. It hadn’t lost the suspicious tone, though, and Tracie stiffened as Goodell started to close the door.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 118